Big Data analytics on Social sites

Last week my colleague was making fun of an email he received in LinkedIn for a Job offering site, he commented ‘now how do they know I needed that’
But with all the data that LinkedIn is collecting they might actually be able to gather trends on similarities of members that switch jobs. Based on the job description, keywords or even your current employer they might be able to deliver some scary results on who fits the profile for who will need a new job soon….

This is a good example of the kind of analytics that social company’s like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, …. can do with all the data they gather from their members and users. Privicy laws are limiting the use case for many statistics right now but it is just a matter of time before we will see the benefits of these social sites predicting what we need and when we will need it.